On paper the 2010 Formula One season should have been the best ever. There are no less than three former champions - Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher – lining up on the grid alongside current title holder Jenson Button
Also, the cars are closer in terms of quality than they have been for a long time, while interesting subplots such as the Hamilton/Button best of British battle and several new teams looked set to culminate in a racing feast for the fans.
Sadly this appears to have been drastically wrong. The first race in Bahrain was a deadly affair, a cure for insomnia and immensely frustrating for race fans and television viewers. It’s all down to one thing; the new rules.
Year after year Bernie Ecclestone and his motley crew fiddle with them like Tiger Woods fiddles with a new phone number. However if you keep messing with something eventually it will break, and it would seem like the FIA have well and truly smashed it this time. The new rules basically assure that this season won’t be competitive, overtaking will be rare, and we will be left with procession after procession.
Lotus driver Heikki Kovalainen wrote on his Twitter account following Sunday’s race: "Seen a lot of comments about yesterday’s race and how boring it was for spectators. I agree totally, we need to do something about it."
Kovalinen has summed it up; unless something is done this season could prove deadly for the sport.
The main problem this year is the no-refuelling rule. It’s absolute madness. The modern Formula One cars can be separated by 10ths of a second, so fuelling strategies are paramount to winning races. It’s like telling a football manager he can’t pick a formation.
With all the cars starting on full tanks they are all on roughly the same weight and that means no one can shoot off from the start. There’s no more one or two-stop strategies to think about, therefore winning a race tactically is now nearly impossible. You are relying on technical malfunctions.
Another problem is the one pit stop per driver rule which was in force in Bahrain. One tyre change is ridiculous, what if you hit debris straight after a change? Drivers will not push to the maximum and risk going out of a race because of tyre damage, particularly when they have to start the race on the tyres they qualified with. It is preposterous.
Returning king Schumacher was not overly impressed with the new changes himself, saying: "Overtaking was basically impossible unless somebody made a mistake that is the action we are going to have with this kind of environment of race strategy."
Ever since Ayrton Senna’s crash in San Marino back in 1994 the rules have been tampered with. It is nocoincidence the last time Formula One was truly enjoyable was in the early to mid 90’s - sure, there have been occasional exciting races and flashes of brilliance since then, but after that fateful weekend the FIA started implementing extreme safety measures which took away a lot of the competitiveness. It was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.
Admittedly, you can’t ignore a death and action had to be taken but it should have focused on tracks and crash barriers, rather than the prevention of cars being competitive. Since then the rule changes have escalated with every season and get wackier and wackier, until eventually there will be a race where the cars start and finish in the exact same order.
Last year there was all sorts of commotion and confusion about KERS and diffusers which set the teams apart dramatically in terms of quality. Earlier in pre-season McLaren were delayed on the track while the FIA measured their rear spoiler to see if it was millimetres too big. It’s madness. All anyone wants to see is close racing and it seems like certain people are determined to suck all the fun out of ever y aspect of Formula One.
Admittedly Formula One isn’t the only sport to be dominated by power crazed know-nothings h**l bent on mutilating the sport, just ask most football fans what they think of Sepp Blatter? However, Bernie Ecclestone and co need to wake up and see that Formula One is all about excitement and won’t attract the fans if it doesn’t lighten up on its rules. Drivers and teams should be granted more freedom to create original cars and strategies while drivers should be given more of an opportunity to show why they are sat in the cockpit in the first place.
Until they rectify the situation they are going to continue to lose fans, lose revenue, teams will fold, people won’t watch it anymore and as a sport it will be a struggle.
Right now it’s about as thrilling as looking out your front bedroom and watching the traffic coasting along the street.
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